Ways the Story Didn't Go
by SJlikeslists
Summary: One Shot Collection
1. Josh Runs

Disclaimer: _Terra Nova_ is not mine.

Josh wasn't Maddy, but that was no reason to think that he was stupid. He had thought this out. He had a plan - or something that was sort of like a plan. Maybe it wasn't the world's best thought out plan. Maybe it didn't have lists and outlines and bullet points like something that his sister would have created, but he had a basic idea of what he was doing. He knew living on the streets wasn't a brilliant plan; he knew it wasn't even a reasonable one. He didn't intend to stay there forever - just long enough for his family to be unable to find him. That's all he wanted - for them to go without him.

He had put more thought into this than it probably looked like it did. He wasn't just some angsty run away looking to get even with his parents for never taking him on a dome vacation or something. He had reasons. He even had goals.

He was the oldest of his siblings. From a practical standpoint, he was the only one old enough to be considered an adult (and that should be reason enough even without considering any of the other issues). He got a pass just because he happened to still be in his last year of school? Zoe was going to be left to fend for herself just because she was the youngest? What kind of craziness was that?

That, of course, was a rhetorical question. He knew exactly what kind of craziness it was. It was the same kind of craziness that had yanked his baby sister out of her home and kept her away from them for weeks. It was the same kind of craziness that left the authorities not telling them anything about her for those weeks (not where she was or how she was). It was the same kind of craziness that had left them with no way of knowing how scared she was or who was comforting her.

He knew all about that kind of craziness. He wasn't going to live with it any longer. That was never going to happen to Zoe again - ever.

If he thought for one minute that him being there was going to make things better - what was going to keep Maddy from getting sick or Zoe being thrown to the wolves - then he would be right there with them. He didn't think that. In fact, he was very sure that it was the opposite. His presence would only make things less likely to work out for his sisters.

Things had to work out for his sisters. Things were going to work out for his sisters. They could be safe. Or, they could be as safe as you could reasonably expect to be in a world that had dinosaurs running around.

Zoe, however, loved dinosaurs, and Maddy loved everything having to do with learning about things that she didn't already know - which made the dinosaur thing not a drawback from their perspective. (He smiled to himself every time he thought about his sisters staring in awe at some giant plant eating animal meandering by them.) He would always have a picture of the two of them living happy lives in that world that was meant for them tucked away inside his hand. It was a good picture. It was a good place for them.

It wasn't for him. He didn't want to be there. He wasn't grateful for the chance. There was nothing about Terra Nova that meant anything to him other than the fact that his family was going to be there. He was okay with that. He had made his peace with it and moved on to what to do about it. His life wasn't going to be there.

His life was here, in Chicago, with Kara. He knew all the things that people would say about being too young to make those kinds of decisions. He called bull on that. He was precisely at the age where people were forever telling them that they should know exactly what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives when it came to work. What made work different than decisions in regards to his family? It wasn't different.

He had decided that most people were liars. They were always saying that things were going to be okay or that things were going to get better. There was nothing better about a system that did things the way it did. There was nothing better about getting Zoe at the expense of his dad. There was nothing better about nights spent wondering whether or not his father had done it on purpose - if he had made some last ditch desperate attempt at giving them the "family is four" excuse for allowing his little sister to stay with them. Sometimes, he understood his dad a whole lot better than he wished he did.

Sometimes, he wished he could shut off the part of his brain that made the things that Jim Shannon had chosen to do make sense. He didn't want them to make sense. He just wanted to be angry that his dad had left them. Josh knew with every fiber of his being that he had chosen to leave them on the off chance that it would somehow all work out in his absence.

His father should have stuck it out. He should have faced the process and paid the fines while playing their little game of feigning being sorry over the broken rules. He should have let them save face; he should have not provoked the altercation - the list of should haves went on and on and were pointless because the should haves weren't the actually dids.

He knew there were other cases involving third children. Maddy wasn't the only one who could look things up on her plex. He might not be as quick. He might not know the right places to start the way that she seemed to, but he could still find what he needed when he needed it. There were other people who had gone through the process of dealing with population control and child services and all the other organizations that thought that they had a right to be involved. In the end, most of those families were still together.

The Shannons weren't ever going to be together again. He knew that. He didn't think this plan was all that well thought out or even moderately so. His dad was going to break out of a maximum security facility only to break into another maximum security facility without anyone noticing? Seriously? Like they weren't going to know exactly where he was headed the instant that Jim Shannon's cell turned up empty?

He needed to stop thinking about that. It wasn't doing him any favors. It was just making him angrier, and he couldn't afford to be angry right now. He needed to be paying attention to his surroundings. It wasn't safe on this side of town. Granted, he had a fairly cynical view of what safe actually entailed. He believed safe wasn't something that it really was anywhere these days. He wasn't sure that it ever had been - despite other people's nostalgia for the good old days. Seedy sides of town, he thought, were pretty much a given throughout all of history.

It was just for a few days. It was not like he had completely cut off ties with the rest of the world. Kara would be mad at him at first for making a unilateral decision. She had wanted him to go. She had only been thinking about him and being safe and a future - as if he had one without her. He knew what that sounded like. He knew what kind of a desperate, obsessive tone that struck in his head (which is why he never said the words out loud). He didn't care if he was desperate and obsessive in his head; he had been desperate and obsessive about several things for a while.

He desperately loved his sisters. He had obsessively taken care of his sisters when their dad wasn't around to do it. In his opinion, he had kind of failed miserably at it. There had been Zoe with the threat of population control hanging over her head every day. There had been Maddy lying in that hospital bed while he sat unsure whether or not she was ever going to wake.

He knew what it was like to fail his sisters. He knew what it was like to watch his mom struggle and not be able to do anything to fix it for her. This he could fix. If or when their dad got caught in the course of this crazy plan (that made no sense but everyone seemed willing to go along with anyway simply because it might work) and this whole things blew up in all of their faces, there wouldn't be a third child around to get in the way. There would just be Maddy and Zoe - both beautifully underage and eligible.

They and his mom could start over - he could give them that. He could make that work out for them. He could even do it while being selfish and getting to keep what he wanted in the process. As far as he was concerned, there was no way in any shape, form, or universe that that wasn't a win all the way around. Besides, it was already handled. They couldn't stop him; it was already too late for that. Even if they tried, they would never find him in time.

As for the note he left his mom, well, Maddy wasn't the only one who knew how to work her parents when it needed doing. It was mean, and he would be the first person to admit that there was self-centeredness wrapped up in, around, and all through it. He had made his choices. He was an adult now - just weeks shy of his high school graduation.

It didn't even matter if he stopped going to classes. He wasn't Maddy, but his grades were plenty high enough to skate through what was left. It would take him a while, but he would find a steady job and a place. If that meant that he had to go pleading with Kara's parents for a spot in their garage for a while, then that was exactly what it was that he would do. If nothing else, Kara would insist just to have the chance of yelling at him some more for what he had done.

It was going to be okay, he kept telling himself. It was all going to be okay. He had made the best decision for all of them.


	2. Hope Plaza

Disclaimer: _Terra Nova_ is not mine.

Maddy Shannon always left early for school.

Her brother teased her about it (half-heartedly the way that he did nearly everything these days except for his music). Her mother had asked her several times if she was sure that it was acceptable for her to arrive at the school that far in advance. Maddy never directly answered either of them. Josh just continued to roll his eyes. Her mother never out and out forbade her from going. She never bothered to mention that the fact that she left early for school didn't mean that she was going to school early. In fact, she usually ducked into class at the last possible second before the tardy bell rang. Her family didn't need to know that.

She always hurried home after school to help with Zoe and the things that someone had to do to keep the house running. Late afternoons and evenings (and even the middle of the night if her mother got the opportunity to add a few more hours to one of her shifts) were her times to be responsible for her little sister and run things in the kitchen. She didn't mind that so long as the mornings before school fell to Josh.

She didn't need to go there every day before school (in fact, there wasn't really any practical point), but she still did it. She didn't think she could explain why to someone else. That was part of why she never told anyone where she was going. It wasn't a short trip to the edge of the cordoned off area, but it was worth it to her. She could have seen the same thing on her plex (there were viewing cams set up around after all), but that wasn't the same as being there. It was different in person even if you still weren't getting very close.

There was always a crowd in Hope Plaza, and she liked to watch it to start off her day. The processing center only functioned for 10 hours each day, but the lines started early and wound around outside of the building in a manner that left those waiting for entrance open to perusal. The transports containing international allotment quotas disgorged their passengers throughout the night meaning that Maddy had never seen the line less than three quarters full in all of the time she had been coming (if she ever came in the late afternoon, she knew it would be different). It was busy in the morning. The lines were full of people leaving to start new lives. Sometimes, she would play at giving stories to the people she was watching. In her head, their stories were full of happily ever after new beginnings.

Maddy remembered going once actually into Hope Plaza back before Zoe had been born on a school field trip to the museum that was attached to the periphery of the complex. That had been in the early years before they had realized that they had not simply found one random opening in the fabric of the universe. It had been back before they knew that portal led to portal and each world led into another in a series that had (thus far) neither ended nor circled back on itself. They hadn't minded the extra traffic then of groups of small children making their way through an outbuilding while preparations for the next trip through had been going on several hundred feet away. That had been back when Pilgrimages were an event with a single digit number attached to them rather than the steady flow of traffic that the traveling had become.

There were no tours now. The museum had been closed down completely rather than simply moved to another location. It was busy enough in the Plaza without a constant stream of tourists trying to insert something along the lines of hope into their daily lives by walking through the displays. She still came and watched. She just did it from a distance. Hope Plaza was real. She could see it even if she couldn't go inside. The people in the lines with their created stories tumbling around the back of her head were real (even if the stories she gave them might not be). People really did get to go. Families really did get to start over. The lines moved forward. They kept going. Hope really was a thing - even on the days when it felt like it wasn't.

She didn't know how other countries handled their selection process - most of them were super secretive. She had a head full of facts and a pretty useful imagination, but the way that other places held tight to the information about how they filled their quotas was beyond her. The only satisfactory explanation she had ever come up with was that they were all just being insistent that how they ran things was no one else's business. She supposed that they might also be trying to avoid system comparisons, but she couldn't fathom that there were too many practical methods that the different places could be using in the first place. She figured everywhere was pretty similar in the basics (unless there were some places where out and out bribes were the order of the day).

The system in the United States was fairly straight forward. There was a random lottery system in place for a certain number of daily transfer slots. If you were chosen for one of those places, then you selected your three dependents to bring with you (the former restriction to immediate family had been waived after a series of protests and lawsuits that claimed discrimination against those without immediate families). You had two weeks (the amount of time the lottery ran ahead) to say goodbye to your life as you knew it. The lottery did not depend on any effort on your part. You were automatically entered as of your eighteenth birthday. One hundred "winners" were announced in a press release each evening (the lottery office sent personal notifications out in the middle of the afternoon). Their three hundred chosen individuals would have their status confirmed by noon of the following day. Either your name got chosen or it did not. It was all chance.

The other slots for those departing daily were filled as needed via a prioritization list. There was one way physical traffic between each portal, but communication could be sent in both directions (the physics of that were extremely convoluted and had once comprised a summer research project on Maddy's part). The initial team that traveled through each new portal as it was located had a standard composition of people with certain skillsets. Depending on the conditions of each new world, requests for other skills or backgrounds would be sent back through the chain. New needs and issues arose all of the time all along the string and losses had to be compensated for whenever they occurred. Sometimes, a lottery winner happened to be a good fit for a particular need as it arose. The rest of the time the powers that be went to the list.

Her mother had held a respectable slot on that list before population control had found Zoe. Trauma surgeons with a background in virology were not an everyday combination, and Maddy had felt certain that their family would be called as a match from the prioritization list sooner rather than later when the details of the newly implemented system had been made public. When Zoe had come along, it had complicated matters. Her parents, however, had always assured her that it would work out if the call ever came. She had been young, Zoe had been little, and population control had been an abstract threat back then (not the reality of her sobbing little sister being torn out of her mother's arms while her father was dragged away in handcuffs that it later became).

That respectable spot on the list was from before. Part of her mother's punishment had been a one year removal from the list (as well as the lottery) with a bottom of list reentry point in both of her fields when she was reinstated. She could only be considered in each of her fields separately instead of as a person who could fill multiple roles simultaneously. Maddy didn't think it was her personal bias that made her view that as a double edged sword for the recruiters. It didn't just punish her mother; it also punished some colony out there that could have used her mother to check multiple needs off of their lists instead of waiting a longer time to fill them each individually as it came their turn to make requests.

Her father had been given the standard penalty for all felonies (of which assault of a population control officer was most definitely one) - removal from the lottery list and a permanent revocation from being considered for skillsets. This was in addition to the prison time that he had received and the population violation fines that he and her mother had both been assessed (ones for which they still garnished her mother's wages). When he finished serving his sentence (she never allowed herself to use the word if the way that Josh did), he would come home to them as someone who could never earn his own spot through Hope Plaza. He could only be taken as a dependent.

One thousand US citizens went through Hope Plaza daily, and her family's best hope now was for the list to run out of other virologists. She knew all of the numbers and recalculated their odds on a weekly basis. She watched the line move each morning that she visited and wondered if the call would ever come. Then, she made her way to school and spent the trip thinking about how even if the odds worked out for them, it wouldn't be enough. There were still five of them rather than the standard four. They were still in violation of the rules. For another couple of years, her father was going to be incarcerated and ineligible to even be a dependent. What would they do if the invitation ever did come?

She couldn't hope that they would make an exception - such things were not things that were done. The situation had never arisen, but she thought it likely they would make a show of demanding that Zoe be left behind. It would be the sort of point that they would want to make for the public. If her parents did accept such an offer (which they would not), then they would use it as propaganda to show the fundamental "selfishness" of those who did not adhere to the population laws. They would be made an example. She was very sure of that.

Her family was backed into a corner at the very least. They might even be permanently stuck. She still came to the Plaza. She still made a pilgrimage of her own to watch the lines. They were stuck for now, but there was always hope. She kept reminding herself of that. The people in the lines helped her remember. They were always moving forward, and her family would as well.


	3. Harsher Population Control

Disclaimer: _Terra Nova_ does not belong to me.

She refers to it as a cell for purposes of expediency. She doesn't know what else to call it. There are no bars or visible guards, but she has been taken into custody. She is locked in and deems the word appropriate in consequence. The truth is that she really has no idea where she is.

The room is small but not claustrophobia inducing (although she supposes that she might feel differently if she was the sort of person who was inclined toward claustrophobia). The lights never change - they just glow away in constant dimness being emitted from a track around the ceiling on three sides of the room. It isn't bright; it isn't dark. It's a constant twilight with slightly more shadow on the single unlit wall where the cot with its scratchy top sheet (and no blanket) resides. The temperature remains a steady slightly cool but not cold that is as unchanging as the light. There is an opaque screen in front of a corner that serves as the bathroom (which only makes her more certain that she is being watched despite the lack of visual clues to tell her where exactly the viewing apparatus might be located). There is a small table with two chairs located directly in front of the door that has neither window nor handle. The only non grey part of the wall is a population control poster featuring the standard "A Family Is Four" slogan splashed across it in an alarming shade of orange that makes it seem to glow in contrast to the semi-darkness of the rest of the room.

It's like the poster is mocking her; she is pretty certain that that is its intended purpose.

She has no idea where she is; she doesn't know where this cell is located. Everything after the population control officers pulled Zoe from her hiding place is a series of flashes of moments from which she feels removed - detached - as if she was watching them from a distance and was unable to intercede. The vehicle in which she was transported held only her - no other members of her family had been placed inside. There were no windows in it either. There weren't windows in the concrete structure in which she had been unloaded or the tiny room into which they had shoved her after pushing and pulling her through a series of hallways and staircases until her attempts at reciting the path in her head no longer made any sense.

She had fallen asleep in that first room (she wasn't sure whether through artificial means or via legitimate exhaustion) and woken in this one. She doesn't know how much time she lost in the transition. She keeps track of how many times she has tried to sleep (sometimes successfully and sometimes not), but she knows enough to know that that doesn't really tell her anything. There is a cup with which she drinks water from the small sink, but they haven't fed her any meals. There is a small tumbler containing two pills that look like they might be vitamin supplements that appeared through the slot at the bottom of the door during one of the times she dozed off, but she doesn't want to take them.

She stopped being hungry a while ago. She is sure that that means that the length of time since she has eaten is fairly significant. She is equally sure that she is in the middle of some sort of a standoff where she is intended to voluntarily take those pills. She also knows that just because she is sure that that is the only thing that makes logical sense, it doesn't mean that that is actually what is happening here.

She is the one at a disadvantage. The only thing that she truly knows is that she doesn't know anything that she needs to know to properly assess her situation.

She sits cross-legged on the bed during most of her waking time with her head leaned against the wall and her eyes closed while she lets her thoughts swirl around the knowledge that she has no idea where her little sister is.

She actually doesn't know where any of the members of her family are, but it is Zoe that she worries over most. Zoe can't take care of herself. She is too little, and she must be terrified. She was scared even before the strangers had pulled her from her hiding place (the sound of her frightened tears is what had tipped off the enforcement officers in the first place after all). Zoe hasn't any memories of ever being outside of their apartment (she was still teeny tiny when their parents brought her home from the place outside of the city where she had been born). She doesn't know what outside is like. She doesn't have any experience to help her deal with a strange place. She doesn't know how to be without someone from their family looking after her. Zoe is still practically a baby, but Maddy knows that the officers from Population Control would not have made any exceptions for her care. Their family has been separated, and she knows better than to even dream of hoping that they have left Zoe with her mother.

She doesn't know what to expect, and she knows that whoever is watching fully intends to use that against her. Maddy has been finding her way into places and information that she should not necessarily be able to access since the strings of binary that make up the background of her world's communication systems resolved themselves into discernible patterns for her back when she was eight. She has found everything that there is to find in every place there is to look about what happens to people that break the laws governing the restriction of children per family. That means she knows exactly nothing about what is going to be happening to them because there is, literally, nothing to be found.

There are no records, no reports, and no information trail about such incidents. She knows that this means that everyone who has been caught (because she is neither naive enough nor intimidated enough by population control's constant propaganda to believe that her parents are the only ones) has been wiped from the systems. It is the only explanation. They have been removed from the records. They no longer exist.

People who don't exist don't have rights. They don't get trials. They don't get to plead their cases. No one comes looking for them.

She knows that much, but she still doesn't know what that means in terms of how this will play out for any of them. They must want something. The fact that she is still here is proof enough of that, but she has no idea what that something might be.

She waits. The lights never get brighter; they never dim. The door doesn't open. The pills stay in their tumbler on the floor where she left them. The bright letters of the poster remain the only spot of actual color in her narrow little world. No sounds from outside filter in to her listening ears.

She keeps waiting.


	4. Population Control Sends Zoe Elsewhere

Disclaimer: _Terra Nova_ is not mine.

It had been his job to be suspicious of the young man from the police department that had been paying court to his daughter.

It was not that he was being snobbish (all appearances to the contrary). He would have regarded anyone from an engineer to a shop clerk with the same level of vague disapproval until further attention confirmed or mitigated the initial assessment. It had not mattered to him that his only daughter was a grown woman who lived on her own and had displayed enough intelligence and initiative to achieve a doctorate degree. He had still been her father - it was completely inappropriate for a man interested in pursuing her to think that she was without protections.

He had been told many times that it was an archaic practice or even some sort of an insult to his child's independence to view the situation in such terms, but he did not trouble himself with the opinions and inaccuracies of those predisposed and determined to willfully misunderstand the situation. His daughter was precious - anyone thinking of winning her approval was to understand from the first that any behavior that caused her injury would be met with consequences. This was the natural order of things, and the man in question (any man in question) would not be allowed to bypass any of those safeguards.

Elisabeth might have clucked her tongue and rolled her eyes behind his back as if she was only humoring him, but his insistence on a series of one on one interviews had been adhered to with a minimum of grumbling within his hearing. The man had seemed sincere in his regard - a fact that was tallied in his favor. His clearly unrehearsed words that awkwardly tried to express the idea that he knew he was outclassed had been equally acceptable.

There was, however, one glaring item in the course of his observations that had prevented him from ever warming up to him more than a basic (and admittedly grudging) resignation. The man was unfailingly impulsive. It was one of those character traits that could be an asset or a detriment dependent rather more on the circumstances surrounding than on the attribute itself. He did not like that.

Being impulsive had the potential to get someone in his position killed. He had, after all, made his daughter's acquaintance in an emergency room. Charm and grand gestures did little to make up for being left a widow young with the possibility of children to raise on one's own, but neither of them had seemed to be thinking through the situation in such a way. His normally careful planning daughter had gotten what they called "swept up." Jim did not seem to have a predisposition toward long term thinking in the first place. Level headedness and practicality had not been the order of the day.

Consequently, he had never trusted James Shannon.

His daughter thought she knew why. They had had involved discussions on the matter at one point that was not so very long ago in the grand scheme of things. She was incorrect in her assumptions on the matter.

There were many reasons for him to be wary of the man, but his mistrust, ultimately, came from one very simple place.

James Shannon was the sort who would always do what he thought was the right thing to do in any given moment. That was not an inherently bad quality. One could even make the case that there was something admirable about it from a completely objective standpoint. He, of course, was not completely or even marginally objective. He was, instead, very firmly in the position of knowing that his only child was the first person in line to have to deal with the consequences and repercussions of those in the moment decisions when their lack of forethought or planning or the ripples into the bigger picture came into play. He had always known that there would eventually be something that left Elisabeth picking up the pieces in the fallout.

It turned out that he had been correct in that assessment. He took no pleasure in that fact. He would much rather have been wrong.

He resented that they had locked him out of the family loop. He did not think it reasonable that they would expect him to feel any other way about it. They had shut him out as if he was untrustworthy. There had been no explanation as to why visits were suddenly an unacceptable practice or why his access to his grandchildren had been relegated to text only messages. He was not even allowed the video chat that had been a staple of their relationship up until that time.

He was hurt, and he did not believe that any reasonable, thinking person could fault him for that.

He could not even ask them what they had been thinking. Contact with his daughter was prohibited per the terms of the agreement. An agreement, he might add, that they were lucky to get at all given the circumstances. There were ways to handle these things to mitigate the damage, but those had all been blatantly ignored in typical bull in a china shop Jim Shannon fashion.

Where was the man now? He was holed up in a prison cell sitting on his backside while Elisabeth would work herself into the ground trying to keep herself and two children going on what was left of a salary being garnished to cover the fines imposed post their hearing. He could not help with that either - another of the restrictions of the agreement.

Josh and Maddy would be allowed to contact him, if they so chose, after they were eighteen years of age and could prove residency apart from their mother.

He would never speak to Elisabeth again. He had given that up in order to bail the family out of at least part of the troubles they had created. He shifted the blanket so that it covered his granddaughter more fully and brushed a strand of hair back from her forehead.

She had cried herself to sleep again. She had had far more turmoil than a toddler could reasonably be expected to handle. She was not even comforted by the fact that she was with family because she had no idea that he was anything other than yet another stranger. What had they been thinking with all of their short sightedness? He was never going to be able to ask them if they even knew.


End file.
